Bread and Wine
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by Ann Kline
On Friday nights, the beginning of my Sabbath, I make kiddish. I bless the wine at my table. I wash my hands and bless the bread, breaking off a piece to eat in reverent appreciation before passing it around for others to do the same. It is for me the recognition of, and grateful participation in, the constancy of God's creative love. It is this sanctification I think of when I witness the Christian sacrament of bread and wine. This, too, as I understand it, is the recognition of and grateful participation in God's givingness.In these two rituals I see the promise and the challenge of interfaith understanding. I do not say dialog, because all too often for me such "dialog" has consisted of talking across our fences. Too often, my experience has stayed at the level of sharing about our symbols, without sharing in them. We show and tell, but we do not step through those symbols to engage and embrace each other at the deepest level of those symbols' meaning.
When I am at Shalem retreats and the time ends with worship together, there is always that moment for me-will they do Communion? How will it be offered? What should I do? It is bread and wine, the symbols of my Shabbat, of a divinity that I would embody in everything I am and do. It is bread and wine, the symbols of Christian participation in the same self-giving of God, of a divinity that they would embody in all that they are and do. It feels so right to share this together. And yet the gap between us is too wide to cross. I cannot take bread and wine offered in communion with Jesus Christ; my sense of "theological" integrity gets in the way. I stand in the circle, I pass the wine, I place the bread in the hands of another, but I do not partake. Too often, this is what interfaith dialog has meant for me-protecting a divide that we look over and dare not cross.
I do not mean for this to sound one-sided. Recently, a Christian friend came to Sabbath services with me. At one part of the service the Torah scroll is paraded around the sanctuary and the congregants use their prayer book or prayer shawl to touch it and receive the blessing of that connection. He could not join in that devotion, to kiss and reverence a covenant we Jews and Christians historically share with God. A covenant that, in its broadest, truest sense, all people share with God.
To have life, our symbols must be more to us than the identifying markers and rallying points of specific communities. This is not to deny the power and poetry of our religious symbols and rituals. I appreciate the significance of the specific stories which birth them. They hold, however, a greater potential than coloring and recoloring those stories. To be fully realized, those symbols must take us beyond the shores of our own communities to the other side. Abraham Joshua Heschel said that prayer takes us to a threshold beyond words where we stand trembling before a deeper, unfathomable sense of holiness. In the same sense, the true life of our spiritual symbols begins when they convey us past their exclusive, contained meanings into their more unbounded, universal and unifying ones. When we can come from that place, it is no longer our dialog, but God's soliloquy.
Richard Rohr wrote:
People the most obedient to commandment and church formulas can very often be the hardest to convert. They've taken the symbol for the substance...the ritual for the reality...the means for the end and become inoculated from the experience of the real thing. That's called idolatry when we worship and protect the means. It actually keeps us from the journey to the end. (Everything Belongs, p. 46)The gift of a "contemplative" stance in all of living is the way it can free us from imaginations that are too small for the breadth and depth of God's heart. The true poetry and power of the bread and the wine can be felt in all its potential when we reach the place where it is more than the kiddish of my Shabbat table, and it is more than communion with Jesus Christ. Can we experience the kiddish as the sanctification that reveals the Divine present in all of life? Can we see in that communion with Jesus Christ "the full meaning of Jesus's self-offering as God's offering to everyone"-God's presence in and with us (to quote Tilden Edwards). When our symbols become a broader invitation to self-giving, an invitation to live and share God's love together in this world, it becomes bread and wine with which we all can be nourished. It becomes a Communion I can share.
Our differences may have their own gifts. I am not an advocate of one universal religion (except perhaps the Dalai Lama's-who said, "my religion is kindness"). Nature contains more than one kind of tree. A tree is not an end in itself, but part of a larger, dynamic whole, and so are we and our religious communities. My prayer is that as we celebrate our sacraments we see them not as ends in themselves but as starting points in a journey that takes us, together, into the universal heart of God.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.